Schmerber v. California

This case helped introduce a new era of Fourth Amendment U.S. Supreme Court decisions, replacing an older era that followed Boyd v. United States. In the Boyd case, the Court called for the broad application of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, extending to "all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of his life." The Court's decision in the Schmerber case, however, limited its application and granted a new exception under certain conditions.

Schmerber v. California also became an important case for later hearings on mandatory employee drug testing. Since the Court decided that blood tests or other extractions of bodily fluids constituted searches and seizures, some courts held that urine tests also were searches by analogy. Consequently, various other cases--Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Assn. and Carroll v. United States--had to decide under what conditions these tests were reasonable in order not to violate the Fourth Amendment.

We thus conclude that the present record shows no violation of petitioner's right under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. It bears repeating, however, that we reach this judgment only on the facts of the present record. The integrity of an individual's person is a cherished value of our society. That we today hold that the Constitution does not forbid the States minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions in no way indicates that it permits more substantial intrusions, or intrusions under other conditions.